The Carlin Report / Canada, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

The Carlin Report

The Carlin Report combines citizen participatory engagement and volunteered geographic information to crowd source near hits between walkers, runners, cyclists and motorized vehicles. Data collected can be utilized by a number of stakeholders to mitigate incidents and shed light on problem locations within a municipal area or region.

Description

The Carlin Report is a method for citizens to input locations of near hits between walkers, runners, and cyclists and motorized vehicles. It displays the locations of near hits in the user's geographic region. Users can quickly visualize problem areas for walkers, runners, and cyclists. The map includes bicycle and foot paths/trails so that users can see the relationship between incidents, roads, and trails.

Users can click on incidents to get an indication of the time of incident and the weather conditions. Users may also submit new reports of instances into the system.

Future plans include heat map visualization, ability to filter location, and ability to manually set location. At this time, the application requires that the user grant permission to access their location in order for the application to function properly. Future plans also include the ability for users to adjust the location of incidents after filing a report; and to enter their email to receive email notifications when other users report incidents nearby their reported incident.

Judging Instructions

Click on "Report a Near Hit"

Select your method of transportation from the icon, currently only walking, running or cycling.

Select the weather conditions at the time of the near hit.

Select the time of day when the incident happened.

Enter the nearest address to the incident.

Click submit.

Note: You must allow the application to use your current location. The application will show you near-hit reports nearby your current location.

Hi! Thanks for stopping by and providing some suggestions. They will definitely be taken into consideration. Aside from the public safety aspect of the app we are really stoked about the public engagement capacity of it.

As noted below, hot spot maps were to be included but we had run out of time. They will certainly be included moving forward.

Excellent work. Would have been great to see a more responsively designed front end - mobile must be a use case for this as I would imagine that most people would want to report incidents as they happened not hours later.

Hi. Thank you for stopping by. Mobile is the focus for this but there would also be the ability to enter information via other means. It's a work in progress, but from all of the positive comments and constructive suggestions we will be moving forward with enhancements.

Some obvious passion for this particular problem although it's going to require a kind of network effect to make it really useful.
The interface is nice and very usable. I'd love to see some navigation options rather than just the zoom controls. The suggested heat maps would also be a great addition!

Hi! Thank you for stopping by. As noted in some other replies below, there are a number of features that we want to implement going forward. The network effect is a great observation in that I find that cyclists tend to know other cyclists, or runners stick together. Stakeholder engagement will be key.

Interesting idea, could actually be useful. My location was wrong though...the app located me at ~300 miles away from my real location. Should include the ability to manually set a location on the map. Clean design overall. Great job!

Hi! Thanks for visiting and for your comments. Useful is one of the main goals. Incidents such as these are generally talked about among friends and co-workers and never go beyond that immediate circle. The Carlin Report however provides a method to "vent" and have it's location recorded where the data can be used for public awareness.

The ability to manually set a location is a feature that was planned for inclusion but we didn't have the time to implement. We'll also be looking into intersection searches as well. It's one of many features that we will be incorporating moving forward. More stakeholder meetings will surely add to that list of suggested features as well.

This app demonstrates an integration of a lot of technology into a cohesive package. These kinds of integrations have been done before and do not represent new way of thinking or a unique new solution to an existing issue.

Not sure how people would use it, since it would be a last thing on my mind to go enter the incident here after an accident.

Hello! Thank you for stopping by to look at The Carlin Report. One of the goals in creating this app was to give an outlet for active transportation users to report these incidents. At least locally, as there is no "accident" these are not reported to police.

There could be a valid reason for these occurrences such as poor signage, road design, tall hedges, lack of bicycle lanes. Documenting these locations provides the ability for organizations to use them to back up claims when approaching municipal governments for changes to or requests for bike lanes.

We would hope that after the person has caught their breath and their bearings they would share the incident to make others aware. Community engagement is never a bad thing. Again, thank you for taking the time to look and comment.

Hi! Thank you for stopping by. Social media integration is a great idea and we'll definitely look into it's incorporation into the app. That would be a great engagement tool between citizens feeding the database and at the same time tweeting it to raise awareness at a municipal level.

There are a number of other features that we are looking to incorporate - namely heat mapping, graph incorporation and the ability to query and export data.

I can't resist: What happens when someone gets hit because they are staring at their phone entering a near accident? Seriously: I see the value of this to the city. The challenge I see is getting people to use it; it isn't something that people (hopefully) would use over and over again, so how do you keep it top of mind?

Hello Ben. Thank you for stopping by. Agreed, the challenge is to get people to utilize it. This opens the door to public engagement and creating public awareness both from an active transportation user and driver standpoint. Communication is essential.

Data collected is not only valuable to governments but to organizations that promote active transportation in that they can use the statistics in their own communities to raise awareness of unsafe intersections or locations.

Partnering with various community groups is essential to engaging the broader community.

This is a great idea. I'd use this biking to different places and have visiting friends check it out when in SF but the great benefit I think would come from the caretakers of these locations. Municipalities, parks depts, stuff like that could really benefit from something like this.

I took points off on design because there wasn't much explanation of what the site did, and the header/logo didn't fit the rest of your theme but overall it was a good looking page.

Hi! Thanks for checking out The Carlin Report. One of the features that we will be including is the ability for organizations, governments to query the database and be able to export the information for use in their own Geographic Information Systems.

We hope that the information collected over time will help in creating awareness about the need to share the road between all methods of active/passive transportation.

Thank you for taking the time to look. Citizen engagement is becoming increasingly important to the decision making process of any city or municipal government. If highlighting places where there are issues to pedestrian/cyclist safety helps in improved signage or driver awareness then it is worth it.